Other than a few graphics, there is so little customization in Zorin that you can drop in the Ubuntu repositories and never notice the difference. And as far as from scratch goes, the first kernel I used as .98 or .99, not quite 1.0, cross compiled for Intel on a Sparc platform, then you had to spend another three days compiling the GNU userland, and then another couple of days for Xorg, at which point you had a mostly usable system.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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The role of a distribution is to curate packages - select the right combination of versions and verify if it works together. Providing package repositories is also a big one, imagine if you had to compile everything on your machine yourself on every update (khm gentoo khm).
Other than that there isn't really a lot of space for innovation. After you have a kernel, some base packages, package manager, and maybe a DE, you can install everything else yourself.
The main point of differentiation these days in on the package management side - do you want a rolling release, or a more conservative approach.
There is one point of innovation left, but it highly technical and somewhat risky for everyday users - libc alternatives. The C standard library is one of the few core packages in a distro that can't really be replaced by the user.
There is one point of innovation left, but it highly technical and somewhat risky for everyday users - libc alternatives. The C standard library is one of the few core packages in a distro that can’t really be replaced by the user.
Why would that be innovation? libc is stable and ubiquitous. Ironically, Gentoo would probably pull it off but it's not for the distros to do, but rather upstream.
Alpine for example uses musl, and Gentoo offers it as an option.
I don't completely understand the benefits, my own programming experience is several layers away from inner workings of an OS, but at least some distros claim there is space for improvement.
This compares GNU's libc with musl (aims at POSIX conformance and being lightweigth), uClibc (size) and dietlibc (size but has no full support?).
It leaves out Google's bionic, used in Android, which is not compatible with GNU's libc... go figure...
So most alternatives aim to be smaller and some also focus on standards compliance (GNU's libc is not fully POSIX-compliant AFAIK).
I think distros at least do some stuff beyond repackaging the latest software, namely default configurations (or lack thereof).
For instance, technically Debian has the packages to do SELinux, but it's Fedora (and OpenSUSE, I think?) that actually come out the box with them.
They are also continually improving, if slowly, their package managers to improve the experience of sourcing new software, as seen with work on apt and dnf.
You are right overall that new distro releases have little meaning any more. If anything, I think they are a good method for managing the upgrades to new software; when a release comes out, breakages can be addresses all at once and solved for a couple of years, whereas rolling release requires a person to be vigilant and repair breakages more often. That is not to pan rolling - I use Debian Testing on my desktop. As much as I like newer software, though, I am thinking of staying on Trixie after it becomes stable, as I get tired of applying updates all the time and then something breaking that is incredible difficult to diagnose.
For instance, technically Debian has the packages to do SELinux, but it’s Fedora (and OpenSUSE, I think?) that actually come out the box with them.
Debian still has to ensure SELinux works if and when the user decides to install it.
the deployed architecture of linux is still evolving right now and there are lots of distros experimenting with different approaches
- how the basic core OS is structured - immutability, A/B partitions, versioned rollback
- how third party applications are executed - containerization, compatibilty, virtualization, bare metal
- how software is updated and stored - package management (apt, pacman, nix, flatpak)
i'm sure i've missed other features of new linux distros. this is all really important stuff but has nothing to do with the apps you actually use day to day
No. Kubuntu now has a non-broken KDE Plasma. Fedora 41 has a slightly improved Plasma 6. CentOS Stream 10 with EPEL 10 will have Plasma 6 too, which is a huge step in "being something I could consider switching to".
no*, no, and no.
*not the ones i'm interested in using.
This reminds me of Rob Pikes paper from the year 2000.
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html